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AM Class 1: Week 7 – One Leg Jump

Once again another week has gone by and it went fast! This past week the assignment was to choose to animate either “Tailor” which is a ball with a tail attached to it, to better understand overlapping action or to animate the “One Leg” character doing a jump. After having my Q&A and listening to what my mentor’s thoughts were on the assignment, he suggested we all attempt the jump. Not that the Tail assignment is a bad one, but he mentioned that as professional animators the likelyhood we would be animating a character with a tail on it is not nearly as common as animating jumps. Also he mentioned how when he was the Lead Animator on Scrat in the Ice Age movies, they actually had a tool that aided greatly in the animation of his tail, so there wasn’t as much “from scratch” animation on the tail. He also made the point of how characters jump ALL the time and he thought it would transition in to week 8’s assignment nicer as well. So I’ll be saving working with the Tailor character for a side project maybe during break week.

Anyways, without further rambling, here is my planning and original version of my jump:

My mentor didn’t have too many things to change with my jump, most of it had to deal with toning down a couple of poses and making them less exagerated and also adjusting some of the spacing on the initial jump. I really enjoyed this assignment and felt like I learned a great deal. Also, now that I am working on Week 8’s assignment, it was useful to have worked with a similar character a head of time. Below is the revision: